> From: Roy T. Fielding [mailto:fielding@apache.org]
<snip/>
> Larry Masinter talked about the problems of reusing port 80 in
>
>
> http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0004&L=soap&O
> =D&P=24041
I've heard some reasonable critiques of SOAP, but this one has me at a
complete loss. Indeed, the argument advanced seems to fly in the face of
REST. I'd love to hear someone explain or defend this.
The essence of the argument in the above article seems to be that by using
port 80, SOAP interferes with "'transparent' interception proxies" that
blithely intercept traffic over port 80 to insert banner ads or present a
"screen" [sic] asking a user for authentication. This is the first time I've
seen an argument advanced that using port 80 for anything other than
"HTTP-for-web-browsing" is abuse of HTTP, or defending the notion that
proxies can blithely alter document content under the tacit assumption that
what is being transferred is HTML for display in a web browser. I certainly
hope this will not be the position of the TAG or the XML Protocol WG.